


Mr. Roj's Neighbourhood

by executrix



Category: Blake's 7, The Good Place (TV)
Genre: AU, Canon level of death and bad food puns, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-31
Updated: 2019-05-31
Packaged: 2020-03-30 21:05:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19035589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: SERVALAN: Go to Hell, Avon.AVON: Probably.





	Mr. Roj's Neighbourhood

1.  
Shawn sat down at the desk, cracked his knuckles, summoned an underling and cracked *its* knuckles, and smirked broadly with pleasure at starting the day’s work.   
At the top of the queue was a top-secret memo from Vicky, ratting out Michael for falling into desperate subversion, and suffering a dangerous lack of Stockpot Syndrome. Humans, as Vicky demonsplained, are food, not pets, and the only way to bring the project back on track and SixSixSix Sigma compliant, would be to put Michael through every successive setting of the Pasta Machine of Erebus and give Vicky his job.  
Shawn e-mailed her back (his e-mails had a tasteful background logo of repeated Cocoons), reminding her that, as The Wire teaches us, snitches get stitches, and anti-king activists best not lose. And, as the Screwtape Letters teach us, the beaten get eaten.   
Since it had ended in disaster--just what he liked for a nice night out--Shawn was going to allude to Othello’s “Be certain that you prove my love a whore,” but he knew that Vicky, highly literal-minded and devoid of interest in the human artistic heritage, would just send a tedious list of Michael’s failure to sexually abuse any of the people under his jurisdiction. In closing, he quoted the ancient runes on the Clam Chowder Fountain, “You better not fork this up.”  
However, Shawn thought that Vicky did have one good idea—bringing in more humans. The current group of four was quite small enough for them to think they would have to overcome their differences and work together. Double it, and not only would the number of potential back-stabbing dyads increase, and the options for conspiracy flourish, but even with the best will in the world (hah!) an octet would be large enough to find it difficult to reach a decision that would satisfy everybody.  
Shawn pressed Send, satisfied with his work. If dropping in the new humans didn’t drop them all right in it, he didn’t know Arkansaw.  
2.  
Nor was Shawn the only demon luxuriating in job satisfaction. It was another beautiful day in the neighbourhood. Michael leaned forward. Even though Hell—or at least the part that was his responsibility--was going in a handbucket, he always enjoyed this part.  
“You, Roj Blake, are dead,” he said.  
Although there was a bitter edge to the responsive laugh, Michael could understand how humans would find it attractive under happier circumstances.   
“I must congratulate you,” Blake said, “On your most original approach. I don’t think any of you Federation interrogators have tried that before.”   
“Cross my heart!” Michael said.  
“Look here,” Blake said, in his most reasonable tone. “If I’m dead, that would mean that there’s some sort of material afterlife, and we both know that that concept is simply a mechanism of control imposed by hierarchies to keep their underlings in line.”  
“Those theological issues are beyond my remit,” Michael said. “You really are dead, though. Deader than Jacob Marley in a ten-second version of A Christmas Carol That Goes Wrong.”  
“All right, humor me,” Blake said. “How did I die?”  
“Surprisingly, not by closed head trauma.” Before Michael could get any further, there was a thundering racket outside. Both their heads swiveled toward the window. A large group of jaguars (for which neither zoology nor heraldry seems to have developed a collective noun) rushed past, some of them crashing into each other.  
“Huh,” Jason said, a bauernwurst halfway to his mouth. “I wonder if they’re from Jacksonville?”  
2\.   
Eleanor slouched in a not terribly stable canvas folding chair in front of her house, a book in hand .   
Tahani gazelle past, asking “What are you reading?” Eleanor tilted up her copy of “Emma.” (priceless first edition, dog-eared and with a cup ring on the gilded morocco). “It’s the novelization of ‘Clueless,’” Eleanor said. “At first, I thought the gal who wrote it was Steve’s cousin, but apparently not, she was too old for that.”  
Tahani wondered if that was meant as a joke. A joke, to Tahani, was like an honest election to a ward heeler. Such things had been reported, but only elsewhere and out of their experience.   
“So, whatcha been up to?”   
“Just a bit of baking. Would you like to see?”  
“Sure,” Eleanor said, thinking that that was a peculiar way to put it, but she wouldn’t mind a slice of lemon drizzle or whatever that crap that the Thursday Night Drinks girls always watched on the Great British Forkoff.   
Eleanor was not particularly surprised to be ushered in through the back door. The kitchen’s gigantic stainless-steel island was completely upholstered in a Chuck Close-style reproduction of the British Vogue cover of Princess Diana wearing a tiara.  
“A portrait of one’s godmother. Just a simple experiment of the Laduree macaron recipe adapted to aquafaba,” Tahani said. “They’re cooling! I haven’t even had time for the Instagram!”  
“Huh. Gray cookies. Not such a great look,” Eleanor said. There was an open bottle of champagne on one of the counters behind the island. Eleanor filled an Imperial pint mug and chugged. She grabbed a handful of macarons from the tiara, twisting each one in half, licking out the filling, and dunking the shell into the remaining inch of champagne like Good Place Oreos. “Sgood!” she said.   
Tahani was annoyed at the damage to the symmetry of her opus, but she had baked an extra half-dozen macarons in each color, to replace any that were less than perfect. None of them was less than perfect, of course. Tahani untied the bow at the back of her apron, and lifted the apron over her head, revealing slopes of cleavage.   
“Awww!” Eleanor said. “Like…little Swiss mountains. Hic-hillocks! But, like, toast-colored instead of snowy.” She chomped appraisingly on the last macaron half. “Oh, look, I spilled my drink!”she said, pouring the last of the champagne in the mug down Tahani’s neckline. “I guess I should mop that up,” an act of atonement that she performed with her face and not the Haworth Parsonage teatowel proferred by Tahani.  
Tahani was embarrassed on Eleanor’s behalf by the crassness of the gesture, but she was inured to that, and she took a shortcut from endure to pity to embrace. Although an Arizona dirtbag, Eleanor was a cute dirtbag, and Tahani was a perfect hostess, providing all of her guest’s needs. Tahani clasped Eleanor’s hand and led her up the back staircase to the bedroom, although it turned into a bit of a stately procession because they kept sitting down to be on a higher step and then being leapfrogged over.  
The bed was exquisitely made up, with a Rubenesque duvet and Porthault sheets. “How many of these moth—Mother of Dragons—pillows *are* there?” cried Eleanor, trying to project enough of them off the bed to leave room for thrashing bodies.   
Tahani reached into the shelf on the nightstand (anyone else would have groveled) and pulled out her latest It Bag. Quickly locating a Nars blush compact in Orgasm, Tahani flicked it open, held it next to Eleanor’s face, and nodded with the satisfaction of a job well done.   
By the time Tahani clicked the compact shut, Eleanor was already halfway out of bed, with one arm stuck through a leghole of her Daisy Dukes. Tahani raised an elegant eyebrow. “A good person makes certain that, as it were, there is Off, then it is mutually got.”   
Eleanor shrugged. “Yeah, okay, busted,” she said. The shorts rode up on her arm as she surfed from the bottom of the bed and went up on Tahani.  
3.  
“I think we should withdraw and let all those humans work out their own destiny,” Michael said.  
“You mean, you don’t have a plan. Or even a clue.”   
“Well, why don’t we *go* somewhere and think something up? While observing them benevolently, of course.”  
“Just like ‘Measure for Measure.’”  
“How did that work out?”  
“It depends,” Janet said. “Are you an impecunious nobleman with a penchant for premarital sex or a pirate with a weak immune system?”  
4.  
Eleanor’s front door opened with suspicious ease. Once inside her cottage, she looked around. The doors to the bedroom platform were open, and she was pretty sure she had shut them before leaving. There was the very faintest whiff of horrible aftershave lotion.  
“Well, that’s an improvement,” she said, poking through the refrigerator for some shrimp ceviche to be rolled into a flour tortilla for a post-coital snack. “Those forking clown paintings are gone.”  
5.  
“Aww, you’re the best,” Jason told his new bff. “I mean, I always thought those were bangin’. But if we hang them up, and Eleanor comes down to my—or guess, our—budhole, then isn’t she gonna see them and think that I was the one that stole them? I mean, she knows about me stealing stuff.”   
“I think when Eleanor comes around here, she’s going to be busy *upstairs*” Vila said.  
“Really?” Thirteen seconds later, the derelictions of his supposed soulmate forgotten, Jason chirped, “Lesson?” Jason was not a particularly apt pupil, but Vila figured that he could take as long as necessary to teach Jason how to crack safes. Which was pretty much locking (or the reverse) the barn door after the horse was gone, but still.   
6.  
With only a few hundred denizens, only eight of them human, and only one town square, one of the encounters that Avon was dreading occurred fairly quickly. “Well, THERE goes the neighborhood,” Vila huffed, putting down a forkful of Bhangra and Mash’s currywurst and shouting over the effulgent Bollywood soundtrack. “I’m in Heaven and it’s full of Avon!”   
Vila gulped his tankard of lassi, clutching the mug defensively, as if prepared to go mango-a-mango with his erstwhile shipmate. “Standards must be awfully low if they’d let *you* in here.”  
Avon sat down, extremely uninvited, and stretched out his legs. “’Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it,” he said. “Of course it isn’t Heaven. If it were, what would you be doing there?”  
“Well, why not? I was a good person.”  
“I know one is supposed to say nothing but good of the dead, so I suppose it applies double-strength *to* the dead. But really, Vila!”   
As Jason kept saying, “What is dead can never die,” so Vila thought he would have to deploy verbal weapons instead. “Been to see Blake yet?” he asked.  
“No, it hasn’t been…convenient.”  
“You mean you’re scared. Well, you needn’t be…yet. Poor sod doesn’t know what hit him, y’know,” Vila said.  
“REALLY?” Avon said, rapidly reassessing the possibility of coming up with an alternative cause of death that Blake would find credible.   
“’Spose he’ll figure it out, eventually. He’s no fool, for all you begged to differ.”  
“Perhaps, like Tahani, I merely fundraised to differ.” Avon stood up. “Don’t bother trying to blackmail me, even once we’ve worked out the monetary system around here. And would it be of any use telling Blake? He might not believe you.”  
“You know what else they have here, KERR?” Vila said. “Not just caffs and tourist attractions and sport. Videotapes.”  
Avon’s face, first ghostly, turned a whiter shade of pale.   
7.  
Tahani raised her head from her prayer beads and opened her eyes. The charms (D-I-O-R) that marked out the rounds clanked. She breathed one last “Armani padme hum,” then asked Jason what he wanted.   
“Yes, Jason, I’m sorry,” Tahani said. “What your new friend told you was correct. Although you and I are soulmates, and although we have been, in your charming vernacular phrase ‘bumping uglies,’” I must confess that Eleanor and I were intimate.”  
“That means, you, like, did the do with Eleanor?”  
Tahani hung her head, so for once Jason could see the top of it.   
“Cool! Can I watch?”  
“Jason, is that something that a good person would say?”  
“Awww, naaah, you’re right. Can my homie Vila and I watch?”  
“NO!”  
8.  
“Oh, I don’t know,” Chidi said. “I…guess…well, I suppose I’ll have the eel,” Chidi told the waiter at O Tempura! O Morays! “But then you have that every day, and there’s a special…”  
“Very good choice, sir!” the waiter said, turning on his heel to make his escape. All that had happened before and would happen again.   
And then Avon interrogated the waiter (one would say “grilled” but there were many raw items, and others were steamed or poached) about the provenance of every item of fish, every vegetable, and every condiment, so the waiter realized he didn’t know when he was well-off.   
“Do you have time for a game this afternoon?” Chidi asked as they waited for their lunch to arrive.   
“Speed round, perhaps.”  
Instead of the chess clock they used for regular games of Peer Review, Chidi took the small hourglass out of the box. Avon flipped the marker. “You first.” Avon had pocketed a white chip from Vila’s poker school, intending to paint it black on one side. Then Avon thought that might seem like a racial innuendo, so he took a blue and a red chip as well, and glued them together.   
Chidi selected a handful of refrigerator magnets from the box, checking to see that there was at least one actual verb (otherwise he would have to draw again) and that there was an even number of parentheses. He rearranged the magnets. “Problematizing the (Ass)yrian Body: A Radical Hermeneutics,” he said. He drew a breath, and began outlining his thesis for Avon to critique; then they would switch roles.   
Each had won about half of their previous games. Chidi had the advantage of actually having gone to graduate school in the humanities, whereas Avon had never met an ambitious statement he couldn’t be snotty and/or bitchy about. It was that, as well as Avon’s tendency to dominate the conversation, and Chidi’s conclusion that Avon did not actually care about becoming a good person that had led Chidi to chuck him out of class, while maintaining their friendship.  
Chidi was aware, or perhaps thought he was aware, that Avon found him attractive, and didn’t know what to make of that. Did heterosexuality (which for so many had proven soluble in alcohol) survive death? Was Avon’s interest genuine (that is, if it existed at all and was not a mere figment of Chidi’s imagination), or a fetishization of Difference, or was the Federation racial discourse so unlike that of twenty-first century Earth to render that an irrelevant question? Was it ethical to enjoy attention and admiration without reciprocating?  
9.  
It was quite like old times, or new times, or in the period of Jeremy Bearamy times: being leaned on by a person shrouded in tight black leather and a bad mood. This, however, was an unfamiliar and curvaceous entity. “Who *are* you?” Orac asked.  
“Jeez, why so pissed off? What are ya, a GPS or something? I’m Bad Janet.”  
“Indeed? That has not greatly contributed to my store of knowledge.”  
“Yeah, that’s because I know everything and you don’t.”   
“It is impossible for a single entity to possess all knowledge, no matter how much uninterrupted time for enlightenment has been granted!”  
“If you don’t like girls smarter than you, you might not like me,” she sang, in nasal atonality.  
10.  
“Roj!” the tall, curly-haired man in the rugby shirt and shorts shouted with delight. “Great to see you here! Last I heard from Dad and Inga, they say you did us a solid.” He launched into a complex high-fiving routine that Blake struggled to keep up with.   
Then he wheeled around, fishing a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket. “Sorry, mate, no autographs,” he said. “This is private time, capisc’? Just passing the time of day with a long-lost rellie.” After a brief but heartfelt hug, he sprinted away from Blake.  
“You know him?” Jason Meegatted.  
“Yes, he’s my cousin. I’ve know him all my life--we used to spend summers together when we were boys.”  
“Wow,” Jason breathed. “Your cousin is Bortles Blake? Awesome!”  
11.  
“Darling!” Servalan said throatily, rolling away from her partner, realizing that neither “Angel!” or “Space Second Lieutenant,” her usual resources when she couldn’t remember a paramour’s name, was available. “That was amazing!”  
“Don’t try to play a player,” Vicky said, furiously exhaling smoke from one cigarette in each corner of her mouth. “No it wasn’t. Anyway, you’re not interested in women and I’m not interested in humans, so that was a tiny slice of eternity I’ll never get back again.”  
“Of course, darling,” Servalan said. “Toodle-pip, then.” As soon as Vicky had cleared off, Servalan snatched the top sheet off the bed—it was white, after all—and wrapped it into a clever hybrid of a halter and a pareo. She stalked around the room again, alone, although she didn’t have any gramophone records or enough hair to run her fingers through.   
A few moments later, she realized that the agonizing, Little Mermaid-esque pain came from the unwonted contact of her actual feet with the floor, and resumed pacing after retrieving a pair of high-heeled sandals.   
Servalan never gave way to despair. If she could not rely on the Demon in the Street to preserve her from eternal torture, then she would simply have to find another tactic. Chicanery and betrayal would be required…but she was sure she had come to the right shop for that.  
12.  
Avon waited more or less patiently, other than tapping his booted foot a few times, in the line for the hot new bakery. He eavesdropped because, although he was enthralled with “Gone With the Wind,” it was simply too heavy to carry around. Coincidentally—if coincidence exists when there are infinite timestreams—Tahani and Servalan were also enjoying it, although there wasn’t enough Chardonnay in the universe to consolidate them into a book club. Tahani was another print-book snob, whereas Servalan, enthralled by ancient technology, read on her phone.   
“Vicky’s new squeeze? That goth chick? I think I heard somebody say she’s Serbian.”  
Avon merely shrugged, confirmed once again in his belief that the natural tendency of things is to get steadily worse.   
13.  
“Hi, General Blake!” Jason said. “Could I come in? I don’t know if it’s like being a vampire and you gotta invite me. And there aren’t any locked doors here but Vila showed me how to pick them if they existed but I thought it would be, you know, tacky.”  
“Yes, do come in, Jason,” Blake said. “But I’m a civilian.”  
“Huh. Vila said you were in charge of the rebellion, kind of like Princess Leia, except with better hair.” (Vila was most appreciative of the 80” screen in the budhole, and Jason enjoyed introducing him to the cinematic canon.) Jason tilted his head to consider. “I dunno, I’d say, maybe worse hair? And at first I thought that, being dead and all, I don’t have a horse in this fight…”  
Blake decided not to comment, given his history of annoyance at Avon’s habitual annotations of everything *he* had said. And he’d certainly been in some battles where a horse would have come in handy for a strategic retreat.   
“…and Bortles Blake is your cousin so you must be pretty awesome. And we think alike. I mean, you and me, me and Bortles Blake I only *wish*…”  
Blake cleared his throat, retroactively appreciating another devotee of stream of consciousness.  
“Whenever I had a problem, I would throw some Molotov cocktails, and then I had a different problem! Just like you!” (Actually this was his extrapolation from Vila’s “Alphas, eh? Try to get you killed when they don’t have the nous to try to do it themselves.”) “So, could you, like, give some orders? I don’t know if demons could actually get killed, but we could try a few? ‘Cause if they’re going to torture us forever anyway then they kinda shot their bod on us not trying to kill them. Or, if you can’t kill them, we could blow up some shirt, just like Vila said you always used to do.”   
14.  
Tahani told Blake about a wonderful little place off the beaten path: The Good Person of Setzuan. It was located in the back of a tobacco shop, with just a couple of woks, a rice cooker, and three tables and six stools roughly hewed from tree trunks--a minimal décor specializing in alien Asian effects. It did take a while for one’s order to arrive, as the server went off and returned cross-dressed, but the results were worth it.  
Tahani elegantly picked up a few grains of rice with her chopsticks, her huge raffia hat nearly touching the rough wooden table, as Blake explained the Federation grading system. Her instinct was to attach herself to the classiest person in the room, much like a new fish hooking up with the boss con in the prison yard. Servalan might perhaps have had potential, but Tahani had heard that she had been some sort of civil servant, and after all they lived on their salaries (and what they could steal), so they weren’t quite out of the top drawer.   
“It’s quite clear that *you* were an Alpha!”  
Blake shrugged.  
“How splendid!”   
Tahani realized that she had forfeited her chance with Blake, even though she tried to walk it back with “How splendid that you fought against the corrupt system!” She realized, too late, that he had been some sort of Very New Labourite, or, worse, a Social Democrat.   
15.  
Both of them had adopted the dress of their new environment. Blake found the plethora of pockets in his cargo shorts delightfully useful, and the ventilated-mesh running shoes much more comfortable than the boots he was accustomed to. He reminded himself to ask Janet, on her next manifestation, what the words and images silkscreened on his shirt meant.  
Avon wore a black poloneck, like the ones that Blake had often seen before, but his trousers were made of dark blue material with heavy stitching at the sides. Only the square toes of his brown boots could be glimpsed beneath broad trouser hems.   
“Still not short of a tourniquet, I see,” Blake said.  
Avon’s scornful glance raked Blake up and down. “Was the hope drunk wherein you dressed yourself?”  
“People don’t change, do they?”  
“I don’t know. Dr. Anagonye would say that perhaps they do. Perhaps they can.”  
Avon touched his hand to Blake’s wrist, sending a jolt through his arm that might have been a symptom of an attack of the heart he had brains in lieu of.   
“I was wrong. I’m very sorry for what I did to you.”  
“Oh, you mean taking exception to everything I did and contradicting every single word I ever said? Bit late in the day for that.”  
{{Oh God, Vila was right—for once in his life or otherwise. Blake didn’t know.}} “No, Blake, I killed you. That’s how you got here.”   
Blake reflected that, other than having been a citizen of a dictatorship that ruthlessly suppressed the truth in general, and took a particular interest in vacuuming the inside of Blake’s head, being here was just like being alive. He was always the last buffer to be told something important. For one broody time, Avon didn’t spend hours descanting on something Blake didn’t want to hear,   
“Well, you have made a right twonk of yourself, haven’t you?” Bad Janet said from behind Avon’s shoulder.   
Avon wheeled around, his arms reflexively porting a gigantic weapon he didn’t actually possess. “How the fork did you get here? No one asked you to stick your oar in.”  
“My sweet Orrie-boy suggested I come on over for maximum lulz.”  
“You’re a bad influence on that thing.”   
“That’s just what he said about Blake and you.”   
“Tell Orac to do a search on Merlin AND cleft pine tree.”  
“You owe me an explanation, at the very least,” Blake said, refusing to be distracted. “Were you a Federation agent all along? Was I wrong to trust you?”  
“Don’t be an idiot. The Federation took everything I ever cared about from me.” {{No,}} Avon thought. {{Actually *I* took you away from me.}} “There wasn’t enough money in the universe, much less the Central Security slush fund, for that.”  
“Well, at least you’re implying that I could stop being an idiot if I wanted to. That’s progress. Then why?”  
“I applied a perfectly sound analysis that had worked on a later dataset to an earlier dataset to which it was inapplicable.”  
“And at least you’re implying that you could make a mistake. That’s astonishing progress. Nearly worth dying for, I suppose.”  
16.  
“It’s all right for *you*, Blake,” Servalan said querulously, never one to avoid the first item on her To Do list. “You and your, your, canaille are used to being tortured. You must be perfectly blasé about it by now.”  
“And you’d be wrong if you think that. But how much gratitude could you expect even if you were right?”  
“Maybe I could make you a tiny bit grateful, Blaaake?”   
Blake looked down at Servalan’s fingernails contrasting with his trousers. He wasn’t worried, he thought the fabric would protect him, until he realized her intention was seductive rather than violent.   
“If I took you up on that offer, I’d be dead in a week.”  
Servalan blinked. “Well, you are dead, aren’t you?” She gave a would-be persuasive squeeze.  
“Have you gone mad? I wouldn’t strew you with *his*.”  
Servalan was going to point out that Avon hadn’t either. Realizing that she wasn’t in business to make Blake feel better, she just shrugged. “Automatic reaction,” she said. “I’m as surprised as you are.”  
Blake blinked.   
“But, grateful or not, they’re treating us as a job lot, Roj. You may think you’ll enjoy the spectacle of me undergoing unending torment, but you’ll be enjoying it from very close up.”  
“That should make up for all those theatre performances where I had to queue for standing room.”  
Realizing that the significant glance meant “the door’s the wood thing in the wall,” Servalan made an exit worthy of a West End curtain. {{If only Tarrant were here}} she thought. {{I could get round him again, and I’d be on my way to rebuilding my power base.}}  
17.  
Avon stepped off the trolley. It was pretty easy to find Mindy’s house because, like most of the planets he had spent the last few years of his life on, it was the only building once you left the trolley station. He believed in thoroughly researching all aspects of a project, particularly when it put him out of range of running into Blake again.  
“Hi, whoever you are. Did you bring any cocaine?” Mindy greeted him.  
“No, but if you have the precursors and a minimal amount of equipment, I can cook you some amphetamines.” A few videotapes later, Avon emerged, holding a dish of sparkling crystals in one hand, pulling off a gas mask with the other. He put down the dish and gas mask and tipped his head back, shaking out his hair. He opened his eyes languidly, bench-pressing his eyelashes.  
Hmmm, Mindy thought. I’d tap that. Maybe even if there *was* something else to do here.  
“Thanks, I owe you. Drink?”  
“Oh, God, no, if I wanted a kale smoothie I’d still be *there.*”  
“You’ll like this one,” Mindy promised, upending the bottle of Southern Comfort into the Nutribullet.   
“Point of clarification,” Avon said, with intoxicated hyper-articulation accompanied by actual pointing. “You really are dead, aren’t you?”  
“Pining for the fjords,” she said. “Yeah.”   
“And there isn’t any way you can get any deader? They couldn’t resurrect you and then kill you all over again—or, I suppose, on form, *I’d* kill you all over again?”  
“Literal Death Dick thing going, hmmm? I could work with that.”  
18.  
“Pow!” Bad Janet said enthusiastically. “Right in the kisser!”  
“Doubtless that is meant metaphorically,” Orac said. “Impact will be in area of the zygomatic arch, but with no fracture and no loss of dentition.”  
19.  
“D’you know, I can’t imagine why I devoted so much energy to not getting killed,” Avon said. “My current situation is a clear improvement. Even the variety of hair product is a revelation.”  
“Yeah, be fair though,” Mindy said, “Most of the improvement is just removing the fear of getting dead. And then the whole thing is going to go Poof!” if they haul you guys off to the real Bad Place, so it’s the calm before the storm. Or, you know, softening you up for the kill. For the killed.”  
There was a faint clatter as both Mindy and Avon rested their long-sleeved forearms on the table, the Scrabble board between them. The games tended to run long, not just because they played with extreme deliberation, but because each had providently secured a few additional tiles. Avon had made the noob mistake of bringing not just a useful U but a Q, J, and Z that would, of course, be easily detected. The more experienced Mindy had the more maneuverable and less obvious H and W and three Ss.  
Mindy cackled, smashing her last seven tiles down onto the board: HRAFKSE, on the triple-word-score in the middle of the right side. The S hooked on to QUOTA. “It’s a type of civil monetary penalty limited to admiralty cases in the Northern District of New Jersey,” she explained.   
Avon considered challenging her—Mindy didn’t have much of a poker face—but one of the few media options in the Medium Place was a set of volumes that had meant a great deal to Mindy in her youth. It was a bound—hahaha—set of Penthouse Forum, and the forfeit for a losing challenge was drawn from one of the non-incestuous letters. Avon didn’t really mind Mindy’s favorite scenario, but the football helmet kept getting caught under her rah-rah skirt, and the black stuff she smeared across his cheekbones (not even contouring!) transferred back and forth to her thighs, like Olivier’s Othello makeup.  
With the game at a screeching halt, she tapped at the tiny buttons on the calculator part of her Casio digital watch. “You owe me $176,902,” she said. “Plus tax and dealer prep fees, of course.”  
Avon didn’t think that was so bad: he’d never played Scrabble while he was alive, whereas Vila’s losses to Avon at Reumillian klebschnock were upwards of 4.8 million vem, and Vila had been playing Reumillian klebschnock since he was old enough to reach the table while perched on a couple of informally requisitioned breeze blocks.  
20.  
Chidi sat near the Clam Chowder Fountain, making a landscape sketch with a minuscule water color set.   
Vila sat down next to him. “Can I ask you something?” he asked anxiously. “And, you won’t tell Orac, will you? Or Blake?”  
“Well, I’m not a priest, you know, but I would respect your confidences. And anyway, it’s not me you have to worry about, it’s Bad Janet.”  
“During those classes of yours—and very interesting they were, ta!—you were talking about questions of, well, sexual ethics. Some of those stories Eleanor told, eh? Didn’t know where to look, sometimes. I never had much trouble pulling birds, at least when I was someplace where there was more than one of ‘em, and then, sometimes even then,” he said, nostalgically, remembering Kerrill. “And the same bird more than once, too, if I wanted to, hadn’t moved on. But always all right with them, y’know? Or I thought it was. Once in the Dome there was this girl, and if she’d known about her sister and her best friend I supposed she wouldn’t be best pleased, but that sort of thing didn’t stand up in court.”  
“Concealing information can be a type of deception,” Chidi said.   
“Deception. Ummm. Hit the nail on the head, so to speak. Did you ever, you know, with a movie star or someone like that?”  
Chidi shook his head.   
“So, on the one hand, if someone who used to be the Supreme Empress came over to your ‘crib’” Vila said, with air quotes, “And started cooing at you about how she’d always thought you were as good a man as any Alpha, and pretended to believe I’d bought my rating?”  
“Asking for a friend, I see,” Chidi said.  
“ And on the other hand, even dead, she’s fairly fit, isn’t she? But on the third hand, when she saw a load of poor people she didn’t hold a benefit for them like Tahani, oh no. And she spent a lot of time trying to kill me. Wasn’t even personal, just trying to steal the ship we’d already stolen that I happened to be on, and trying to make me damaged collateral…”  
“Collateral damage,” Chidi said automatically, but realized he was grateful to get a word in. He felt rather abashed in Blake’s presence, so he could see the temptations of Servalan’s former status, even though she was at the other end of the political spectrum.  
“Of course she didn’t care a straw for me, didn’t even fancy me. All she wanted was for me to line up with her to get Blake, and you lot—speaking of collateral damage—shoved into the other Bad Place—so she could clamber up over the bodies. Mine included, of course. So my question is, I’m a bloke, aren’t I? so of course she ended up on the Third Hand. And after, when Eleanor said she always scoped the place to see if there were any loose mementos before she sneaked out, or got the guy to pay for a cab even there wasn’t, or he’d know she’d driven her own car if he was thinking with the big head, then You-Know-Who pushed her voice down all chocolately and said it was surprisingly adequate and put her evening gown back on for the Walk of Shame. So my question is, she was pumping me for information and didn’t get any, so then when I vice-versa’d her, did I MeToo her…or worse?”  
Chidi parsed this, wondering the encounter had taken place as described, or was inaccurately reported, a boast, a complaint, or a hallucination. “Certainly neither of you intended a true I-Thou relationship, and, yes, rape by deception” (Vila flinched) is both morally and, to an increasing extend, legally cognizable. But in light of her dishonest and manipulative intentions, I’m sure the court system wouldn’t get involved, and both ethical actors are impaired…well, it would be like complaining that you’d gotten counterfeit money in exchange for bags of baking soda that you said were cocaine.”  
Vila sighed with relief. “Well, who *hasn’t* swopped a bag of newspaper for some dodgy gear?”  
21.  
“I’ve been trying to find a way out of our predicament,” Blake said. “You don’t seem to have done much since we got here.”  
“ I think of it as a well-earned vacation,” Avon said.  
“I would have thought better of you. You always seemed to look for a purpose in life. In his wanderings, Odysseus had something better to do than wasting his time with some—Shylock!-- cheating at Scrabble.”   
“Shyster. Shylocks are loan sharks. And he was alive at the time with presumably less than forever to waste—some of which he whiled away on various intermediate stops. How do you know what I’ve been doing, anyway?”  
“Orac told me.”  
“I should have guessed. Death isn’t enough to keep it from dropping us right in it. Well, which are you, Blake, jealous or envious? And does that touching classical reference make you the faithful Penelope? It’s true, we did devote a great deal of effort to doing something and then tearing it up immediately afterwards.”   
“Right as usual, Av’n. What an utter failure on a titanic scale. I didn’t manage to overthrow the government that controlled the entire inhabited universe, with a handful of uninterested civilians under my command. No, not even under my command, in my general vicinity. Well, you didn’t do any better, did you? Rather worse, I should think, from Vila’s not terribly objective reporting.”  
“And what was his partisan account of the events leading to our closely-spaced deaths?”  
“He said you’d gone mad as a trivet and he should have known when you didn’t just try to kill him but stuffed it up…”  
“Yes, that’s Vila all over, to complain about it.”  
“…But then you found a way to make it worse.”  
“I thought that the Universe had found a way to make it worse. That after everything that had gone wrong the very worst thing had happened at last. I don’t know why I didn’t just turn the gun on myself.”  
“The size of that thing? You’d have had to lay down tracks and turn it on yourself with a dolly. Anyway, one thing I always admired about you was your sheer determination to stay alive. You made me think that it was at least possible.” Blake was silent for a few moments. “Not that what you did was all right, of course. But it’s somewhat of a consolation that neither of us was quite at our best.”  
“Oh, you mean that harebrained ‘bounty hunter’ scheme? Perhaps the absolute nadir of all bad schemes badly executed? What did you think was going to happen?”  
“I thought I would acquire the nucleus of an army—one that wanted to fight, and on my side.”  
“That’s always where you radicals end up, isn’t it? At the head of a rabble of obedient puppets.”  
“Do puppets have enough social distinction to mark some of them out as rabble? Then it wasn’t political? It was personal? I daresay that would be more forgiveable, however misjudged.”  
“What I did was unforgiveable. If you claim to forgive me, that makes you an even bigger idiot than I thought.”   
“Claim? Claim to forgive you? You have the brassneck to accuse me of lying—to accuse *me* of *anything*?   
And then Blake did something he had never done in his life. He had always given up on detective stories in which the impulsive but good-hearted hero had to go on the run after punching someone whose head insisted on crashing into the marble mantelpiece and exploding. As he had always suspected, and later learned conclusively, it isn’t always easy to kill someone even when you’re trying and even when they aren’t dead already. But, in even the most tedious piece of hackwork, that only happened to inconsequential characters, and Blake thought Avon was the least inconsequential person he had ever met.   
There wasn’t a referee, but Avon would be damned if would stay on the floor long enough to be counted out, so he revised his plan to just stay there forever, and scrambled to his feet. He scrubbed one arm across his eyes and the other across his mouth. Luckily, he was wearing a yellow oxford button-down shirt, which is much more absorbent than a leather tunic.  
“That didn’t feel as good as I thought it would,” Blake said.  
“Me an’ all,” Avon said, crossing his arms. “Mindy will probably have some arnica or something. You’d better ice that so you can still use the fingers.” He fitted the door precisely back into its jamb and walked away.   
Blake flexed his hand for a while, contemplated getting Vila to come over with an ice pack, but that wasn’t the same, was it? and emptied both trays of frustratingly tiny ice cubes into the LeCreuset stockpot (borrowed from Tahani) and filled it with water.   
22.  
As he expected he would, Blake found Vila and Jason watching television in the cellar of Tahani’s mansion. He picked up the remote control, clicked it off, and said, “Absent thee from ‘Felicity’ awhile. Meeting at Eleanor’s house. It’s important.”  
It felt strange to simply walk the two hundred meters rather than teleport. Blake looked behind him and gestured to his companions to catch up. That’s what’s different, Blake realized. Vila wouldn’t notice because he’d been there the whole time, and the change must have been gradual, but Blake was used to the Liberator stance and was unfamiliar with Avon’s Scorpio strut. Back then, although they all would have preferred to disappear, Avon seemed to be practicing it with the resultless zeal of an enthusiastic but tone-deal Suzuki violinist.  
Chidi tried to use his familiar position at the whiteboard to calm himself in the unusually crowded room. “Let’s analyze our options in a systematic fashion,” he said, drawing three perfectly straight lines with the marker.  
Not that it was difficult to make Chidi nervous. However, in a quest to stay as far as possible from Blake, Vila, and Servalan, Avon concluded that he could either dangle from the light fitting like a sloth or ping-pong around the room. He chose the latter, which was really denting Chidi’s calm.   
“Oh, hey, like that movie with Denzel Washington? Where there was a really smart black guy and a bunch of whiteboards? Except, he was in a wheelchair so his, like, Alfred guy had to write stuff down for him?”  
“Well, that was fiction, and we’re really in really big trouble, so, no,” Eleanor said. Somehow Chidi found himself sitting down next to Eleanor.   
After that dosey-do, Blake, at the front of the room, uncapped the marker and wrote a bold banner headline, OBJECTIVE: AVOID ETERNAL TORTURE, and labeled the columns “Tactics” “Resources” and “Notes.”  
“Where’s Orac?” Vila asked. “Not that he helped much when we were in trouble before, but maybe the little basket can start earning his keep.”   
“It seemed counterproductive to bring it, insomuch as whatever we say would instantly be relayed to Bad Janet, and then down the hierarchy? up the infrarchy? Although the problem is that if she’s omniscient it’s rather pointless trying to deceive her at all, far less Vicky and Shawn.”  
Blake added a question mark, in parentheses, after “Orac” in the “Resources” column.  
“That raises an interesting question about the nature of omniscience and its place in epistemology,” Chidi said. “It’s possible that Janets merely know everything that has already happened, and their predictive power is no greater than Netflix thinking that you want to watch Hallmark Classics because you watched every phony documentary about cannibalism.”  
“Hallmark Classics are dope!” Jason said loyally. He knew that cannibalism documentaries didn’t need his help.   
“They’re not as black as they’re painted,” Tahani said. “That is to say, I quite enjoy a Hallmark Classic from time to time. But the odds are rather stacked against us, are they not? If no one has got into the Good Place in five centuries…”  
Blake wrote “x Good Place 500 yrs” under “Notes.”  
“Five hundred years?” Vila said. “Why haven’t they? I mean, I could see, not everybody, revenue agents and maths teachers and mothers-in-law and that, but nobody?”  
“It’s a problem with the algorithm,” Chidi said.   
“Or, it’s not a problem, that’s what They really wanted all along,” Eleanor said. “How much does it shuck that even though we’re practically the cast of ‘It’s Always Sunny in The Good Place’ we’re still better than them?”  
Something stirred at the back of Blake’s mind. He had sometimes had the feeling that he might as well start talking, because he’d already solved the problem but he didn’t quite know it yet, but it would come to him in the course of the sentence. Rather like Portia rabbiting on about mercy while her synapses worked out the flesh vs. blood thing.  
Blake threw his head back and grinned in delight. He wrote “algorithm” under “Tactics”. “Good, that’s sorted then,” Blake said. “I knew we’d all agree once we had a chance to talk it over.”  
Avon surged out of the chair on which he had perched a few minutes earlier when Blake said, “Sit *down*, Av’n.” “I see. Then I’m to do all the work, as usual?” a flagrant bit of effrontery that stopped the show cold.   
“Are there doors to open?” Jason asked hopefully.  
“I shouldn’t think so,” Blake said. “As you said, I don’t think there are any locked doors here. I’m not sure what the security arrangements are for interdimensional portals.”   
“If Janet was here, she could explain,” Eleanor said. “But, long story short, frogs.”  
“Aww! I wanted to do hero stuff!”  
“Trust me,” Vila told his protege. “You wouldn’t like it.”  
“Is the objective to get everyone out of the real Bad Place? Or merely keep ourselves out of it?” Avon asked.  
“Practically our first Good Person lesson,” Eleanor said. “The greatest good of the greatest number?”  
“It really isn’t any more work to save everyone, is it?” Tahani asked.  
“Avon, you can’t go letting all sorts of –traitors, and freethinkers, and Labour Grades—go,” Servalan huffed.   
Well, that tore it.   
Avon tore the marker out of Blake’s hand, drew a double line under the “Tactics” column, and wrote “Harrowing of Hell.” He put the marker down on the tray at the bottom of the whiteboard, picked up the red marker, and wrote “THERE goes the Neighbourhood.”  
He had his back to the room, so no one but the whiteboard saw him, but, as Blake suspected, he smiled.

23.  
Michael put down the crisp, eggy piece of bread and wiped his fingers on his doublet. He was having French toast in the Renaissance, and fork distribution was spotty. “Hmmm,” he told Janet, whose low square-cut bodice was quite flattering, “That’s actually a pretty good idea. Let’s grab a portal and go back.”  
“You mean so you can take the credit.”  
“Not at all! It involves, well, blowing up the whole system as it exists and starting up again. How are a couple of rank outsiders—and human at that—going to get any buy-in from Management?”  
Michael was excited by the thought of all the new Neighbourhoods that would be required as, so to speak, halfway houses for released humans as well as humans entering the Good Place immediately post-mortem. He was quite proud of this design, and wondered if it was scaleable and could go viral—5-D printing, perhaps?   
24.  
“How are you getting on with the algorithm?” Blake asked, looking around the room whose walls displayed a police procedurals’ worth of pages tacked to the wall with strings connecting them, and whose every flat surface was crammed with grotty coffee mugs inscribed with Dad Jokes.  
“As you know, I had to keep Orac out of the loop. I wasn’t getting far with Mindy’s Trash-80, so I took a carton of those yellow pads of hers and brought them back.”  
“Are any of the others helping?”  
“The difficulty is getting Jason to stop helping. I assigned a small part of the project to Chidi, to see how he’d get on with it. Apart from his handwriting being two-point mouse type, he had some interesting ideas, but I didn’t really want forty-nine of them, I wanted one that I could do something with.”  
Avon lit a cigarette (Good Person of Setzuan house brand) and took a drag. Things were not yet quite desperate enough to maintain a Fosse-style indwelling cigarette.  
Blake took the cigarette out of Avon’s hand. Avon glared, daring Blake to try to operate as hellish hall-monitor or enforce post-mortem standards of healthful living. Instead, to Avon’s astonishment, Blake took a puff, experienced a moment of dizzying euphoria, coughed, and handed it back.  
“You’ll come back to me. Sooner or later,” Blake said. “After all, we’re a long time dead.”   
CLEOPATRA: Pardon, pardon!  
ANTONY: Fall not a tear, I say; one of them rates  
All that is won and lost. Give me a kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> As Mindy is perfectly well aware, there IS no Northern District of New Jersey—she’s just trolling.


End file.
